Curcumin, a highly therapeutic component in turmeric root, is continuing to garner attention in the medical community.
Like any good alternative medicine, it’s also attracted the wrath of mainstream skeptics, who are now claiming that there’s no proof whatsoever of its medicinal value. A 2017 Forbes article revealed a possible ulterior motive by concluding with a warning that medicinal chemists should be more careful “when they go looking for new drugs in nature.”
You can see the same old dogma rearing its head in those words: the medical establishment should stop paying attention to these silly natural medicines, remedies, and foods, and get back to “real” medicine (i.e. synthetic pharmaceuticals).
Motives aside, that claim that curcumin is medicinally worthless is an incredibly bold one (even for Big Pharma and its media allies), given that there are thousands of published studies demonstrating its therapeutic value. Certainly some of them could be based on corrupted data or biased protocols, but all of them? There’s simply too much data in favor of curcumin to ignore it.
So, moving right along.
Of all the seemingly endless benefits turmeric offers, cancer treatment is perhaps the one that has conventional medical researchers most impressed
To understand how curcumin fights cancer and why this component of turmeric is considered by many to be the future of cancer treatment, we need to look at the nature of cancer and the drawbacks of conventional oncology.
Cancer: A deadly industry
Cancer is a hyperproliferative disorder. This means that it’s not a foreign agent like bacteria or viruses; rather, it’s your body’s own cells that have differentiated incorrectly. Once these harmful cells begin to spread and multiply, they form colonies and progressively hamper natural functioning. Your body’s ability to fight the spread of cancer on its own is limited, especially because it’s difficult to distinguish between cancer cells and normal cells (telling them apart is called selectivity).
To help your body out, conventional oncology uses chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. These methods are effective for removing large numbers of cancer cells, but only because they’re horrendously toxic and will kill anything they touch. These treatment modalities have almost no selectivity.
The result: large numbers of healthy cells die right alongside cancer cells. The body is weakened even further, the well-known side effects of cancer treatment set in, and the patient begins a race against time—can the cancer be eradicated before his or her body becomes too weak to carry on? One study demonstrated that over 50% of patients die from the effects of chemotherapy, not from the cancer itself—and that number may be conservative.[1]
Curcumin provides a better way
Enter Curcumin.
Research has shown that this humble little molecule can accomplish what no conventional cancer treatment can: it kills cancer cells and halts the progression of the disease without damaging the body’s healthy cells, and without any negative side effects.
And it does so in a staggering number of ways (as opposed to the single-mechanism shotgun approach of chemotherapy or radiation therapy). One prominent study even has the following sub-title: “How Many Ways Can Curry Kill Cancer Cells Selectively?”[2]
As we’ve discussed in past articles, curcumin works on every level to prevent the spread of cancer. Most primarily, it heals the whole body (rather than damaging and weakening it, like chemotherapy), thus boosting your innate ability to fight cancer. It combats the root factors that allow cancer (and other imbalances) to flourish, especially inflammation, oxidative stress, and endocrine imbalance.
Curcumin even helps your body fight cancer through a sort of epigenetic enhancement, adjusting gene expressions here and there in ways that perfectly inhibit cancer’s ability to thrive.
Furthermore, curcumin directly targets and kills cancer cells. This is the mechanism that most interests hard-nosed medical researchers, because it provides an easy comparison between curcumin and conventional cancer treatments (and, one would hope, paves the way for functional foods to become an accepted treatment in the future).
As mentioned above, curcumin kills cancer cells without harming normal, healthy cells. It even targets cancer stem cells (the “mother” cells that control that growth and proliferation of cancer cell colonies)—something neither chemotherapy nor radiation therapy can do.
The right way to use curcumin
One of the strikes against curcumin, according to those disparaging mainstream articles mentioned above, is that it’s very hard for the body to absorb. This is indeed the case, but it by no means precludes curcumin from being medically helpful.
You simply need to take the right form of curcumin in order to see results. Eating raw turmeric, powdered turmeric, or isolated curcumin will certainly have some benefit, but not anything near those cited above. To experience turmeric’s true cancer-fighting potential, you need to overcome the bioavailability issue.
Liposomal and micellar curcumin are by far the most bioavailable delivery methods available on the market. Purathrive Curcumin Gold combines both formulation methods to create something truly special—and it’s even mixed with ginger oil, another potent cancer fighter.
References
[1] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(16)30383-7/abstract
